Configuring Text Fields (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this article, I described the various properties used to modify the "look and feel" of text fields. Most of these properties deal with the visual aspects, such as font and background color. They also handle various techniques for clearing out the text in a text field. In this second part, I will focus on the virtual keyboard and the behaviors of changing your entered text (due to spelling or capitalization errors). It is likely that most people will be interested in changing some of the default behaviors. As revolutionary as the iPhone virtual keyboard is, some of the things it does can be quite annoying for some applications. At the same time, some of the customizations you can make really help the usability of your application, so it is best to understand all your options in order to make the best user experience possible. These are additional properties of the UITextField object you can change: autocapitalizationType

Setting this property determines when characters are auotmatically capitalized. The allowed enumerations are:

• UITextAutocapitalizationTypeNone
• UITextAutocapitalizationTypeWords
• UITextAutocapitalizationTypeSentences
• UITextAutocapitalizationTypeAllCharacters

None will not autocapitalize anything. Words will capitalize the first character of every word, whereas Sentences will capitalize the first character of every sentence. AllCharacters will capitalize every character. The default is None.

autocorrectionType

The autocorrection mechanism on the iPhone allows you to type "fast" and it will correct most of your mistakes. I find this works well, but in some cases I don't want this behavior. Luckily you can disable it. This property can be set to one of these values:

• UITextAutocorrectionTypeDefault
• UITextAutocorrectionTypeNo
• UITextAutocorrectionTypeYes

The Default defers to what the documentation refers to what the "script system" supports, with no explanation of what a script system is. I assume this indicates in what context the keyboard is used. The UITextField is not the only user of the keyboard. By setting autocorrectionType to Default, you will get the auto-correction behavior *if* your current script system supports it. For the purposes of UITextField, it does support auto-correction. Setting this property to No will disable auto-correction. The default is Default, which for UITextField views, means auto-correction is enabled.

enablesReturnKeyAutomatically

By default, the return key on the keyboard is enabled. However, you can change this to be disabled *until* some text has been entered in the text field. I'm not sure what use this is for text fields, but you might have a need. If you set this property to YES, then you will have this keyboard when you have no text entered:

The return key is disabled, but as soon as you entered some text, the keyboard changes to this:

keyboardAppearance

There are two types of keyboard appearances supported: one has the blue-gray background like the one above, and the other has a black background, like you see on alerts. The two enums this property supports are:

• UIKeyboardAppearanceDefault
• UIKeyboardAppearanceAlert

If you choose the alert appearance, the keyboard looks like this: As far as I can tell, there is no other difference in looks or behavior with this keyboard

keyboardType

Depending on what kind of input you are gathering in your text field, you can have different keyboards that are optimized for that type of input. The keyboardType property can be set to one of the following enums. I also show what each keyboard looks like:

UIKeyboardTypeDefault:

UIKeyboardTypeASCIICapable:

The default looks the same as this. My guess is the default can change depending on context, whereas the ASCIICapable one always look like this.

UIKeyboardTypeNumbersAndPunctuation:

This is your standard numbers and punctuation keyboard.

UIKeyboardTypeURL:

This keyboard is handy if you are typing in a URL. Also note that if you tap and hold on the .com button, you'll get a little pop-up window that will allow you to choose .edu, .net, .org, etc. Here is what that looks like:

UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad:

This is useful if all you need is to enter numbers.

UIKeyboardTypePhonePad:



This is similar to the NumberPad, but this one resembles a phone keypad, with the letters under the numbers and the "+*#" button.

UIKeyboardTypeNamePhonePad:



This looks like your standard ASCII keypad, but the difference is when you hit the digits button in the lower left, you get a phone-specific keypad:

UIKeyboardTypeEmailAddress:

 


These are slightly optimized for entering email addresses.

returnKeyType

Just the return key can be changed with different labels. Like the keyboardType property, this allows you to customize the keyboard to fit your scenario. However, many of these are very application specific and may not have much use for text fields: UIReturnKeyDefault UIReturnKeyGo UIReturnKeyGoogle UIReturnKeyJoin UIReturnKeyNext UIReturnKeyRoute UIReturnKeySearch UIReturnKeySend UIReturnKeyYahoo UIReturnKeyDone UIReturnKeyEmergencyCall I won't show what all these keyboards look like. The only difference is the label on the return key. The useful ones for most text fields would be Next and Done. When the return key is tapped, no matter what text is on it, the text field will call the textFieldShouldReturn: method on its delegate. You can use this callback as a means to do something when the return is hit. One common trick is have textFieldShouldReturn: resign the first responder, or in normal English: give up the focus, which in turn hides the keyboard.

secureTextEntry

If your text field is for entering passwords or other sensitive information, you can get the password-like entering behavior by setting this property to YES. When this is YES, only the last character entered will display in the text field; all others are replaced with a dot. Here is what is looks like:

There you have all the properties you can change to modify the keyboard and auto-correction behaviors of your text fields. Instead of accepting the defaults, you can customize your text fields and make them more user-friendly and efficient.